29 PALMS 3) FOOTPRINTS

3. FOOTPRINTS

     It was a weekend. I either didn't have offbase liberty, or didn't have any money. I decided to go for a hike in the desert that stretched out behind the barracks to the ridge and beyond.

     Some of the guys wondered at that... Jesus Christ man, there's nothin' out there, it's like the dark side of the moon, you could get lost and never found, it’s just artillery range, you could set off an unexploded round and be found in pieces. Still, somebody offered to go along, one of the others trapped like I was by rules or by the fact that last payday was long gone and it would be a while before "the eagle shit" again.

     I wanted to go alone. I've always had moments like that, when I've needed to separate myself from those around me, to go off and listen to my own voice and to the voice of the world and to a conversation between those two voices without the presence of everyday loyalties and concerns. 

     There was no trail; I just plodded through the sand toward the rocky ridge that made a jagged dark blue line against the crystalline blue of the sky to the East. It wasn't quite summer, so it was hot but without that killing heat that would soon come. (Later that summer, we had a week when the temperature hit 125 degrees every day, when you were conscious of sweating but never felt moisture because it dried so fast, when walking outside made your utilities feel like when you were a kid and your mom had just finished ironing your jeans and you put them on fresh off the ironing board and they burned your legs.) I had my cartridge belt with two canteens, and a couple of candy bars. I'd be okay as long as I kept my bearings, which I'd grown up doing, though not in country like this. 

     Approaching the ridge, then crossing it, didn't seem as dramatic as it should have been. I just kept walking, and the terrain gradually changed, the ridge looking bigger as the omnipresent sun signaled midday, then receded into a blue shape that looked much like it did from the base on its other side. The land beyond the ridge may or may not have been very different from the land where the base's buildings, which I now imagine would have appeared as rows of Monopoly real estate assets if viewed from the air, were laid out in rectilinear rows. It seemed that, perhaps less for its total lack of human constructions than for the fact that without buildings to look at, and without the skull-occupying concerns that went with those buildings, I was now forced to look at the land itself, and not at the next street corner, the movie marquee, the shaved brown legs and halter tops of the officers' wives and daughters as they walked in and out of the PX. 

     The land beyond the ridge was just big and empty. Vegetation was low, sparse: struggling to get enough water and not too much sunlight. Arroyos etched by flash floods lent occasional textural relief, but in the picture now bounded by my horizons, plant life and geological features dissolved into the vastness. 

     I walked and walked, keeping the ridge at my back. Sometime in the afternoon I stopped to drink from my second canteen, and to look around. There was nothing but the sameness of the desert, the empty sunblasted distance capped by a skyfull of sun. I continued my slow turning, then pulled the canteen away in mid-swallow. I must have been standing on a slight rise, though I hadn't noticed climbing one, still hadn't noticed any significant change in the empty landscape. I saw, off near the western horizon, a lone set of human footprints. They startled me, both by their mere existence and by the fact that I could see them from so far away. I speculated that the angle of the sun must have been low enough to cast a shadow into each footprint, making them visible against the bright sand for a long way.

     What wandering fool, what lonely soul, had been walking there? I let my eye follow the prints: slowly, slowly... as my gaze followed the meandering trail closer to where I was standing, I saw that it was heading in my direction. I followed, as if in dream, the approach of the prints to my hillock, looked down, and was adrenaline-jolted into the realization that the footprints, the only visual interruption of the desert's emptiness, were mine. I was quite startled when I looked down at my boots and saw them standing in the final pair of tracks. 

     It was one of the most naked feelings I've ever had. I turned again, looking in the direction I'd been headed, half hoping that the trail would continue there so I'd have something to follow. But no: as much of the world as I could see was emptiness, and I was but a speck in it. I had arrived at no particular place, and with no signal by which to continue.

     I was chastened, even scared. I turned and followed my tracks back to the base, walking faster than I had on the way out.